SEGA today announced that due to expected heavy losses for the last financial year, the company would be undergoing a structural reform, and thus a number of staff redundancies have been announced across the board.

According to IGN and TSSZ, the entire US QA testing department will be shut down amongst losses amongst other departments such as marketing.

Consequently, SEGA will be trimming it’s roster of games, keeping it’s developing focus on titles such as Football Manager, the Aliens franchise and Sonic the Hedgehog among some of the names to be retained. SEGA did not say which games will be cut, but the company have stated that the reduction in size will benefit in sustained “profitability”.

Although not strictly Sonic-themed news, this announcement will undoubtedly impact the franchise all the way down to the community teams who deal with TSS and other fan sites.

We will keep you posted on any impacts in the Sonic Universe as they come.

About T-Bird

T-Bird, the seasoned TSS writer has interests in the music and merchandise of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. T-Bird is involved in community relations with SEGA and is the stage manager for the Summer of Sonic convention.

Remember them saying they were going to give a reboot to a “beloved IP”? …I didn’t realize it involved real people :/ And, well, that’s just great. They got rid of the US QA testing team. I hope it doesn’t affect the quality of the games, but something tells me it will.

Ugh, more layoff news from the game industry. Best of luck to everyone who lost their jobs. I just wrote a long diatribe about how broken the game industry clearly is when people losing their jobs en masse has become “business as usual”, but I forgot to enter anything in the email field and so the whole thing got erased on submission.

I’ll keep it short then. Forget rebooting IPs, reboot the game industry.

I feel bad for the employees, but sadly its business. I doubt this will strongly affect Episode 2 or ASR 2, but hopefully this won’t cause another, “Sonic Recession” as I’ve come to call it, with any future Games…

God bless all those who have lost their jobs due to these lay offs. I hope that you will find work somewhere else. But I too must admit this is pretty scary news, hopefully this doesn’t affect Sonic’s future.

Man, that’s a shame for those poor workers.
This could also affect the Sonic series as well, possibly in a negative way.
I just hope that putting more focus on Sonic could somehow positively impact the series.

Well, yes. No QA team in the US means that translation errors could get by more easily. It’ll put more pressure on the other teams to make sure everything goes right. Yes, I’m sure Japan has a testing team, but even they miss some things and when it comes to translating…